Chapter One

      England, 1862

      “We should be there, should we not?” Aurora Wells demanded anxiously as she leaned toward the window on her niece’s side of the hansom cab and peered out onto the foggy streets of London.

      “We haven’t been gone quite long enough, Aunt,” Clara Wells replied patiently. She surreptitiously tried to extricate the skirt of her gown from beneath her aunt’s ample hip before the expensive silk was hopelessly crushed.

      Aunt Aurora’s turban of cloth of gold perched on her henna-dyed hair tilted over one pale blue eye and threatened to tumble into Clara’s lap. “It cannot be this far to Lord Pimblett’s, surely,” she insisted, this time addressing her husband, “not even in such fog. I do believe the cabbie intends to cheat us!”

      “‘Had we but world enough, and time,”’ Uncle Byron quoted absently from his place on the opposite seat, his gaze fastened on the water-stained ceiling of the cab.

      Despite his distracted manner, he was, Clara noted approvingly, dressed in very proper evening clothes, unlike Aunt Aurora. With his beatific expression and shoulder-length white hair, Uncle Byron looked kind, and even quite wise. Kind he certainly was, and wise he might have been, had his mother not made the fatal error of naming him Byron, for her son had come to believe that with such a name he must be a poet.

      Her aunt, on the other hand, wore what might have been fashionable among the artistic set fifty years ago. Her gown was a Regency style, with the waistline beneath